![]() ![]() Rather, he hopes that it will stand as a tribute to his father and all those whose lives were lost or irrevocably changed by the tragedy that was the Troubles.Group of foreign journalists killed by Indonesian forces in Portuguese Timor (1975) That’s a marker or a turning point from which you can never go back.”ĭoherty has never re-read the final chapter – and says he never will. “It’s a book of my childhood memories and experiences up until the point where I lost my father. ![]() “It’s not a Bloody Sunday book,” explains Doherty. On that day, as on every other, he was still “this man’s wee boy”, the child playing marbles on the street who learns that his father has been shot. In 2010, he stood on the steps of Derry’s Guildhall as the dead and wounded were exonerated, and as the British prime minister apologised. He was shot by the army.”ĭoherty was among those who began the campaign, more than 20 years ago, which eventually led to the Saville Inquiry into Bloody Sunday. Nowhere is this stronger than in the final chapter: the taste of the chewing gum in his mouth, the pattern of the stair carpet beneath his feet, the silence in the house as his mother tells him “your Daddy’s dead. When Tony’s classmate, Damien Harkin, is killed, it is his father who takes him to the church to light a candle for him.ĭoherty recounts not just the memory, but the sounds, smells and sensations that make it come alive, from the cool of the chapel and the flickering of the candles to the smell of his father’s cigarettes. “I can still remember hearing the noises of the British army machinery up the street, pulling girders, and you could hear the steel shrieking as it was being pulled apart … I can smell his Park Drive, I can feel the fog on my face, and I swore that day he was going to be shot.” In one of those memories, Doherty remembers how his father confronted a soldier at their front door. The more I started to think back, and see him and meet him, it was like getting to know him again.” “I didn’t really think I knew my father that well, because I was only nine when he was killed. “Even as a teenager I did sense that what I was remembering about the period was rich and valuable,” says Doherty.Ī re-reading of Seamus Deane’s Reading in the Dark – set in a part of Derry a stone’s throw from his own childhood home – convinced him to begin writing.Ī handsome man, a stubborn man, a man who sang to his wife and was a steward at civil rights marches, Doherty feels the writing process has helped him recover memories of his father that he had almost forgotten. It is both a stark reminder of the extent to which blood spilled during the Troubles seeped through not just families, but whole communities, as well as a valuable social history of the realities of everyday life in Troubles Derry. His skill is to make us identify not just with his own family, but with the many characters that make up the fabric of his childhood and, as the years progress and the riots worsen, we fear for them all.Ī blood-soaked car near Tony’s house marks the death of Seamus Cusack and George Beattie, shot by soldiers in Derry in 1971 Mrs Thompson, who Tony sees sweeping the street, will be killed later that year by an army bullet in the garden of her home in Creggan, leaving six children Tony’s classmate Damien Harkin is knocked down and killed by an army lorry. In a poignant passage, Doherty describes lying on the living-room floor in darkness, watching the sky lit by army tracers, waiting for the firing to stop so the family could have their tea. There is also a darker side – waking at night to bin lids “sounding their warning” and in the morning finding the street “littered with stones and broken glass, and there was the smell of burning in the air”. A rubber bullet is proudly brought in to show the teacher a hut built by Tony’s gang is mistaken for an IRA observation post and the army is observed on patrol in the school playground. Their childhood quickly takes on the contours of the Troubles. Hence the army becomes a source of fascination – and of money to be earned running “messages” for the soldiers – while local reaction to their arrival is summed up in an argument between his mother and father over her taking them sandwiches (she wins). The strength of these accounts lies in the authenticity of their nine-year-old narrator whose perceptions – unclouded by adult interpretation or reflection – retain all the innocence and excitement of a child experiencing something for the first time. From a child’s point of view, it meant “men wearing white armbands stood guard at the foot of the street” while the British army adds a sangar sandbags and soldiers with accents “like Blue Peter”. ![]()
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